Yeovil Town Manager Mark Cooper spoke to the BBC reporter Ian Randall at the end of the 2-1 win over Hampton and Richmond, you can hear the whole interview at the bottom of the article.
In a rollercoaster game, Mark Cooper spoke of how proud he was of the away win, how frustrated he was with the officiating (Gloverscast Rule 1 has been well and truly thrown out the window this week!) and how he wanted his side to have put the game to bed earlier.
“Some things in football are uncontrollable and they’re variable, and that’s nothing to do with my players, my staff, our supporters.
That’s an external source that we can’t affect that tried to affect our performance today because it was a totally dominant performance and I’m convinced we’d have gone to win it by a really good score.” Cooper said of the man in the middle today.”
Speaking about the two yellow cards for Jake Hyde, Cooper explains that the front man was harshly done by, with the second yellow in particular.
“So there’s an incident, he gets booked for kicking the ball away and I’ve just seen it, he is probably two and a half, three yards on side right in front of the linesman.
He gets given off side, kicks the ball away – wrong – and then he miss miss controls one makes a bit of a block and the referee sends him off for that. If that had been another 10 minutes, I reckon he could possibly have booked 22 players if he’d have carried on”
The words got a bit stronger to describe the red card given to his captain on the day, Matt Worthington.
“Laughable. Matt Worthington is defending the goal deflection off their players’ knee, it kicks up and hits Worthy.
He’s got his hand right by his side it hits him on the arm, can’t do anything about it. It’s not a penalty, and it’s a joke of a red card.
So there’ll be some explaining to do this week, I think for for the officials and the assessors and luckily, luckily, it didn’t affect the result, but it should have been so, so much more comfortable.”
Asked if he’ll appeal the red card, Cooper simply stated…
“Yeah, 100%. There’s no chance you can get suspended for that. It’s just a joke.”
Right, onto the performance and Cooper was very happy at the solid nature of his side, whilst also wishing the game was done and dusted in slighty more convincing fashion – on the score line at least.
“(We were) Very good. I think you could see that we’ve done an awful lot of work as a defensive unit this week to try and make us more miserly as a group and we look really solid as a team, I couldn’t really see them scoring, It was going to be a long ball that we didn’t cover around on.
My only little gripe is that we didn’t score four or five, we had two great chances in the second half.
Youngy, he’s come inside he usually buries them, but it’s just about the three points, massive three points and it’s two points a game again, and that’s where we need to be.”
“…it’s just about the three points, massive three points…”
Jordan Stevens scored the opener with a long range rocket, something Cooper was expecting to come sooner or later.
“If you look back at his goals, there’s three or four in there that are like that, he’s got that in him, but he’s also got in him where he can smash them over all over the place, so today was the one that he nailed, really, really sweet.
It was a cracking goal, but you see his pace, him and him and Young cause problems because they’re so quick and sharp.”
…and as for Rhys Murphy’s fourth goal in two games…
“It was a good play, we had some play ball down the side and Murph sat about, sat about three defenders down and rolled it in a corner like he does.”
The gaffer wasn’t done with the ref though, Eugene Robinson is firmly off the Christmas Card list…
“But my thing is imagine how we would be feeling now or how we would be approaching this if we hadn’t won that game, but nothing to do with us, nothing to do with our performance or mistakes to do with an outside or an external source, it has to be better than that, Marks Ives at the National League, they need to look at this and things like this can’t continue to happen.
Otherwise, you’re going to have hundreds of players suspended before the end of September”
“Alex Whittle, felt his groin a little bit, so (his substitution was) just precautionary, but the team today were I thought they looked really professional, really robust, aggressive and played some great football.”
You Can Listen To The Full Interview from BBC Somerset’s Ian Randall Here
You can watch Mark Cooper’s conversation with the club’s official YouTube below, covering many of the same topics.
[…] We’ve included a screen shot, below, but this does slightly go against what was suggested post-match with Mark Cooper telling the BBC that the ban would be “Competition Specific”. […]